Troubleshooting on cellular mobile data networks such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) gets more and more important as the number of subscribers starts to pick up, the traffic on these networks increases and subscribers start to use more and more different applications and services. There is a demand for diagnostic solutions, which makes it easy to discover what and where the problem is in the network.
In particular, the telecommunication network environment is rapidly moving toward increasingly complexity, involving multiple technologies, multiple protocols, and interconnections to a wide variety of networks. More complex network environment means that the potential for problems in internetworks is high, and the source of problems is often elusive. Thus there is a strong demand for robust diagnostic tools for troubleshooting networking failures.
Currently there are diagnostic tools which correlate multiple protocols on either an access network or a core network portion of a telecommunication network. While such tools are useful in identifying certain network issues, they are nonetheless limited in their diagnostic capabilities since neither one covers the network end to end (e.g., access network to core network).
It is to be appreciated that when a network problem arises, it can be rooted anywhere in the networks: the access, or core network, or in both places. To troubleshoot network issues quickly, it is imperative to have visibility to the entire network at granularity of a session/call.